P.C. Cast - Mysteria Nights

The backyard went straight back, like an arrow, and the garden sat at the top of the yard like an arrowhead. It had grown over, of course, but could be brought back again; it was the right size for a salsa garden, or perhaps some cutting flowers.

The front yard ran straight up to the road and was small, almost an afterthought. There was no sidewalk; just a paved driveway that led to the small detached garage.

In the front yard was a sign: white, with stark black lettering. It looked like a For Sale sign, but the largest letters read FOR CRYING, and the rest of the sign read:

. . . out loud, think about what you’re doing! This is a weird weird weird town. There’s a reason this house has been on the market going on ten years. Think carefully before you so much as set foot on the lawn.

(It was a large sign.)

Then, in smaller letters, accompanied by a red smiley face: DON’T FORGET TO TAKE A BROCHURE!

The house sat like a jewel, and waited.

His first memory was of the moon, a shining, broad black face with the whitest teeth and the darkest eyes beaming down at him. When he checked his medical records years later and did the math, he figured out it would have been his third trip to the hospital; his second broken arm.

Mama Zee, the most sought-after foster mother in the county, had taken him home after signing all the paperwork (her righteous name, according to the most-helpful chart, was Ms. Zahara J. Jones) and put him in the battered wooden crib in her tiny third bedroom. (Willie and Konnie were in the other bedroom, and Jenna slept on the foldout couch in the living room.)

He did not remember the foster father breaking his arm, or the other foster father breaking his other arm, and he did not remember doctors or the hours of pain, but to the end of his days he would remember her smiling face. That, and waiting. It seemed he was always waiting: for a ride, for a class to start, for a job, for a hug, for a friend.

He was just a dumb baby then, and didn’t know what the moon really was, but for a long time that was how he thought of her: Mama Zee, the moon.

In the end, he always came back to her. He loved the moon, but could not stay: for one thing, the noise drove him fucking nuts. Mama Zee always had kids around. There were always toys underfoot; the cupboard was always stuffed with little applesauce containers. Even as a small boy, at four, at six, at nine, he would have to get out, wander about on his own for a while.

After a while, the cops never ever caught him; he was too quick, and too quiet. But he always came back, and after the first two times, when Mama Zee saw that no matter how many times she smacked him with the dish towel or yelled, no matter what she did or how she worried, he would leave, he was compelled to go. But he always came back. And so she didn’t worry. Or, if she did, she never spoke to him about it.

She even gave him a book once (well, she gave him lots of books, many times, but this one he remembered especially) about a kid named Jack who could travel between dimensions; his family called him Traveling Jack. “That’s like you,” she told him, “you just can’t stay in one spot, boyo. And that’s fine.”

Well, no, he thought. I can’t stay here, is what it is . But he didn’t say it out loud. He’d bite off his own fingers before he’d say something so mean to her.

In fact, the entire neighborhood treated Mama Zee as a bomb that might blow up in their faces, because they knew he was quick, and quiet. And strong.

Mama Zee had all the help she needed getting groceries delivered (and because she usually had between three and seven foster kids at any one time, the milk bill alone was staggering), all the extensions needed to pay local vendors, and nobody ever broke in.

Occasionally, on his travels, Someone Bad would take it in their head that he might have something they wanted. It always went badly for Someone Bad and the older he got, the easier it got.

At first he put up with it, because he knew the bloody nose, the black eye, the whatever, would be all better in a day or two, sometimes less, depending on the moon. It was the price you paid for choosing not to sleep under a roof; that, and cold feet.

And then, one day it was like he had a lightning flash, only inside his brain. And the flash was made up of words: Not today, pal . He was nine when he realized he could make a grown man cry. It was shockingly easy.

He wasn’t a bully (Mama Zee would have smacked him half to death with that dish towel), but he’d crunched up quite a few of them.

He wasn’t very good in school—something about sitting still in a classroom reminded him of Mama Zee’s noisy, toy-strewn living room. But he was good at other things.

When he got big—and thanks to Mama Zee’s cooking, he got really big—he found out people would pay to get and keep a bully out of their lives. Pay a lot, sometimes. And sometimes it wasn’t a bully; it was an ex-husband or a mean boss or a bad cop (but really, under their outside skin, they were all bullies). And the older he got, the more they paid him. Almost like if he didn’t do the job, they were afraid he’d do them, so they practically threw money at him.

Of course he wouldn’t; he was still a little nervous about Mama Zee’s dish towel, though he had twelve inches of height and sixty pounds of muscle on her, and she was old; she was fifty-four. But the people didn’t know that, and so they gave him money.

He didn’t know what to do with it; he tried giving it to Mama Zee, but she only took enough to pay off her little house in Revere. He knew better than to talk her into retiring; the moon did not get tired of changing the tides, and Mama Zee loved kids. And she wouldn’t move to a nicer neighborhood. She wouldn’t take a car, either; not that a person needed one in that area.

He paid for Jenna’s college; she was grown now, and still sleeping on the couch. She took it with thanks, and moved out, and Mama Zee didn’t say anything, but he heard her crying later. Only it was the good kind of crying, so he wasn’t sure what to do about that. In the end he did nothing.

Finally, Mama Zee said to him, “You’re grown, boyo. Don’t you want a place of your own?”

He just shrugged; his skin was itchy and he kept looking at the door. The new kid, Bryan, had colic. It was noisier than usual in the small house on Winthrop Avenue.

“Stop that twitching and pay attention to me; you can go soon enough. Don’t you ever think about getting a girl and settling down?”

“No,” he told her, and it was the truth, naturally. He couldn’t imagine lying to her. Like he couldn’t imagine taking a woman for his own, and cursing her as he was cursed. He would never.

That made her look sad, for some reason, and she slammed a cup of applesauce in front of him. She felt better when he ate.

He hated applesauce.

He got a spoon and started eating.

“You should take some of that money and buy a house of your own,” she finally said. She watched him eat every bite of the pulped fruit. “Your own house, where it can be as quiet as you want it. And then, maybe . . . the rest will come.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Because—I’ve been thinking about this a lot, boyo, and you can’t be the only one. The only one in the whole entire world. Right? You can’t.”

He shrugged.

“Just because you never ran across another werewolf,” she added sharply, as if he had contradicted her, “doesn’t mean there aren’t any others out there. If only your birth parents—”

She stopped talking, and he was glad. He had never known them, but he didn’t like them. They had been killed in a car accident, and left him.